Every year, the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center conducts a survey to gauge the use of legal technology by attorneys in the United States. My thoughts on the prior reports are located here: 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010. No survey is perfect, but the ABA tries hard to ensure that its survey has statistical significance, and every year this is one of the best sources of information on how attorneys use technology. Yesterday, the ABA released Volume VI of the report titled Mobile Lawyers. This year’s report once again shows that a large number of attorneys are using iPhones and iPads.

Six out of ten attorneys now use an iPhone

In both 2014 and 2013, the survey revealed that 91% of attorneys use a smartphone. (In 2012 the number was 89% and in 2011 the number was 88%.) For the past four years, there has been a slight correlation between law firm size and smartphone use. In 2014, for example, 86% of solo attorneys reported using a smartphone, 89% in firms of 2 to 9 attorneys, 95% in firms of 10 to 49 attorneys, and for firms with 100 or more attorneys, 96% use a smartphone. As a whole, though, it is fair to say that the survey consistently shows around nine out of every ten attorneys use a smartphone. . . .

It really is the iPhone’s fault. Yes, Apple is to blame for designing the most desirable piece of technology of the last decade. So desirable, in fact, that employees of all stripes requested (and, often, begged) their IT departments to toss the increasingly-‘corporate’ Blackberry out the window and allow the use of their personal iPhones for corporate emails and calls. As a result, we have been living in the age of ‘Bring Your Own Device’ where employees use a single personal mobile phone (or tablet) for both their personal email, texting, and social media while also using it for work email, word processing, and other enterprise applications.

Before the Bring Your Own Device era, a company’s greatest out-of-office security concern was an employee who left a briefcase in a taxi. Today, the worry is an employee misplacing a device the size of wallet containing almost limitless amounts of data that criminals or hackers would easily and quickly exploit if given the chance. Clearly, there is an obvious financial motivation for all businesses to protect their own or customer’s sensitive data.

However, lawyers face particular ethical consequences if they fail to take reasonable efforts to either investigate the technologies that they implement or protect their client’s confidential information. . . .